manage to turn vaudeville into a life drama

he stepped upon a scene?

every time

In addition to her mental embarrassment her third shot was complicated by that indescribable and often incurable palsy of the nerves that falls upon a fine marksman who has unaccountably missed fire at a time when others are waiting for him to make good. Shaken and actually frightened by the loss of her former clever potency, she registered a third shot that was wilder than the previous two.

She waited tensely for Tandy's fourth, and when it did not come she turned upon him nervously.

"Well! why don't you shoot?" she asked.

"Don't calc'late to have to," he explained, his magnificent indolence being wholly unassumed. "You-uns'll be 'bliged to unload into the heart pretty lively to make a score."

She raised and lowered her shaking arm several times before daring to pull the trigger. She was terrified to remember the days of her ignorance, when she had been so dangerously free with deadly powder and shot. Before, she had thought that a bullet had to go where it was meant to go. Now she saw that a bullet, like a poet, was subject to distressing flights of fancy. Why, she might have killed Tandy while shooting at his knife. She might have killed Roycroft. She might have missed the rattlesnake. Her whole security was wrested from her.

When at last she fired, the random lead went whining into space, not even nicking the tree. Tandy retired his gun into his hip pocket and leaned back more comfortably. He shook the lock of hair from his eyes, folded his arms, and surveyed the loser.

"Pay your forfeit, miss, pay your forfeit," said the

audience, entertainedly making a circle around the two principals.

Imbued from her youth up with the stern importance of obeying the rules of a game, she made a slow step towards the victor, but this time she knew that she was going to be a coward and a cheat. She was no longer a child in a schoolyard playing with boys. The kiss had changed appallingly, too. Fifteen minutes ago it had been merely the careless thing she dropped upon a flower, upon the soft skin of a child, upon the white hair of old age. Now it was charged with overwhelming significance.

"Cal," she said, "I can't."

"Sure you can't," he agreed, laughing. you're a woman and no woman plays fair." "I did play fair!" she claimed.

" 'Cause

"Payin's part of the play," he pointed out. "You shot square, but you shot to win. That's all O.K.so did I. But next time you pretend to be a man, a square one, take heed that you don't bet something you can't pay. That's all. I want everything that's hard to get, but don't never want nothin' that's grudged me."

Seeing that the promised entertainment was off, the men widened out.

"But now that you can't shoot, miss, wot cher goin' to do when you gits into trouble?" asked a highly amused voice.

"Ask Cal Tandy to do my shooting for me," she answered immediately.

To her surprise she noted the slight scorn in his dark eyes die out in a misty blur that was shockingly like the moisture of tears.

"Do you mean that, Laurie McAllister?" he asked.

"Why-well-yes," she faltered. "Yes."

"You'll never have to ask twice," he promised. "You've paid me. We're quits."

Assisted by twenty ushers, she mounted her cart seat and grasped the reins.

"Tell me how to get home," she asked affably. “I came by way of the sulphur spring, and each person who told me the road put me on a new turning. By now I don't know where I am."

"I don't believe you do," said the gorilla, in his most musical tone. "The sulphur spring is miles out of your way."

"Bring the mule," commanded Tandy.

It was brought and he straddled it bare-backed, his shawl still on his shoulders, his long legs almost touching the ground. But as a safe escort he owned certain formidable points of skill and courtesy that would have given Sir Galahad-if met-the tussle of his white young life.

"I'll put her on the high road," he said.

"And take the forfeit there?" mused the ever sentimental gorilla.

Tandy slapped his pistol pocket and eyed his lady. "Want me to begin on him?" he asked.

"No," she answered, laughing. "They are all my friends and I don't want any of them killed off. Goodby, boys."

They locked arms and warbled "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow" till she and Sir Gareth were well out of sight.

With the dying away of the music there fell a complete silence between the travelers. Calhoun might be, and was, a magnificent safeguard, but he was noticeably poor company, parting with the fewest possible words,

and parting with them mostly one at a time, always by way of curt instruction-"Easy,” “Right,” “Left,” "Duck," "Watch out," "Come on."

In between these puffs of speech taciturnity reigned. He led the way on his mule, giving Christianity nothing to do but to smell the mule's tail and follow.

Her only task being to hold the useless reins, Laurie had plenty of time in which to ruminate upon her dumb cavalier, and sincerely to admire his mule, which was not the dun-colored, moth-eaten, tubercular bag-ofbones that Balaam was, but a clean, white beast with good lines, worth possibly as much as two horses. In sandy, panting Florida, a man with no ambitions and a good mule can go considerably further than a man with good ambitions and no mule.

She tried to keep her mind on the mule, but her thoughts persisted in wandering to its rider, who read the roads and forests better than a scholar reads his books, and who successfully followed trails that in many instances were not much more than hog-tracks, half the time under swamp water, too. She began to see how a girl like Osceola could love him and be happy married to him, for she now had proof that he could "boss" himself as well as others, that he scored the blows of Fate against Fate herself, and did not try to get even with that inscrutable lady's agents. His recent hot mention of Roycroft had been tinged with the bitterness of sorrow, not of hate. Osceola's meek tactics, expressed in her remark that she only wanted to caress his lock of black hair out of his eyes and kiss him, would be the right ones to tame him and to hold him. Had he not himself said that he would never hurt a li'l cat that had come to him to fall asleep?

On they went, past bogs of cypress upon whose protruding "knees" were generally perched long-legged birds or short-legged turtles, these last always hurtling back into the scummy water with a splash; past dryer thickets red with a berry that the natives called "holly," though it was not holly in the least; through arid stretches of dead sand white as salt, whose breath was hot as the breath from a blast furnace, and where nothing grew but the easily satisfied palmetto-scrub whose leaves were frayed as hotel fans at the end of the summer season; through spring-fed spots of green where wild honeysuckle matted and bloomed, throttling disgusted-looking pin oaks half to death, but forming fragrant coverts for the bluebirds and cardinals.

Laurie feared that she herself did not make a picture to meet the romantic requirements of the floral surroundings and pregnant silence. One cannot rattle around on the high, hard seat of a lurching farmwagon and feel properly dignified. And to have three dirty barrels of turpentine waste stacked up behind one does not improve matters. On the whole, she was rather relieved when the trail eventually angled them out upon the main road at a point hearteningly familiar to her, where her own lake was pleasantly and beckoningly visible.

And yet with that relief was mixed a premonition of final parting that closely resembled regret.

Calhoun checked his mule, letting Christianity pass him till he and Laurie were side by side. Having no tail to point the way, Christianity naturally stopped. "Yonder's you-all's home, Miss McAllister," said Tandy, briefly.

Never before had he addressed her with the formality of "Miss," having always drawlingly Laurie-d her